Two years ago, my sister googled my
symptoms & warned me I would bear
cavities in my stomach. Back then,

I laughed, telling her I shed
grief like a fish. That all the softness
I had been holding would bloom

into sashimi, wet as a newborn
weeping. The body narrowing
into shadow. Two years ago,

when I first turned jawless,
the teenage lifeguard found a beached shark
on the shore of a lake my sisters & I

deemed monstrous. That night, we snuck
through the gate to see if it had
two heads, human teeth, a body worth

honesty
in retelling. Instead, we found
its dagger-white belly scribbled

with blood, a dark smiley
etched underneath the tail.
We imagined it to be from local

fishermen, abandoned beer cans, the
serrated teeth of sea glass. Shark pups
sensing loss & gnawing their way out of

their mother. Two years ago, I imagined loss
to beget loss. I didn’t know
it was from me all this time, it was me

careening into the dark,
scraping against softness.

 

Josephine Wu is a writer from New Jersey. She has been published in diode, Hobart Pulp, and Eunoia Review. She has also received two Best of the Net nominations and was a Lannan Fellow for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown.